Inspired by this challenge, I am squeezing some classics into my reading this year. Some are re-reads, but while reading these works I will particularly particularly have my eye on atonement themes. I was intrigued but not wholly convinced by Ben Myer’s summary of the patristic doctrine of the atonement in his chapter in the volume Locating Atonement and would like to road test it through a least a couple of patristic works.

First up has been On the Incarnation. It is a clear and short book, for good reason often recommended as an entry point to the church Fathers. The writing is not hard and while the concepts may be expressed in an unfamiliar way to those who have read only or predominantly modern theology, they are straightforward enough to grasp. I also much enjoyed the Letter on the Interpretation of the Psalms that is included as an appendix to the Popular Patristics edition, which deftly weaves through how the Psalter is both a microcosm of Scripture as a whole: “a garden which, besides its special fruit, grows also some of those of all the rest [of the books of the Bible],” and suggests how each and every Psalm (including the 151st!) can be appropriated by the believer.

Some atonement-related things that strike me from the main text of On the Incarnation. I am no expert and have read little to no secondary literature on Athanasius (at least recently), so these are merely personal observations.

1. Athanasius refers to death as the “natural law” of human existence. He views the original state of humanity as in a sort of tension between our possession of a corruptible nature (“men who, as animals, were essentially impermanent” p.28), and the gift which we received of sharing in the being of the Word himself by possession of the imprint of his Image, which preserves us and promises immortality should we not fall from it. Our created state is stable but only because “union with the Word” (30) through image-bearing enables us to escape the natural law of our corruptibility. But once this gift is rejected and the command of God transgressed, then we come “under the natural law of death” (29).
   
2. Death is also spoken of as a power that has dominion or mastery, that will “have [it’s] way with them” (32), that needs to be defeated and conquered. There is also plenty of language of death and corruption as a state or condition of humanity that needs to be remedied or healed.
   
3. However, this is not viewed as a merely impersonal process like a disease that God needs to heal, or an external agent that he needs to conquer. The rule of death is also the judicial penalty for the transgression of God’s law: “it was the penalty of which God had forewarned them for transgressing the commandment” (31). The divine remedy for this situation cannot ignore this facet of the problem: “It would of course have been unthinkable that God should go back upon his word and that man, having transgressed, should not die” (32).
   
4. As there are broadly two sides to the problem, so the solution has two strands for Athanasius. Christ must both maintain the divine consistency and fulfil the word of the law that sin would lead to death, and he must heal human nature from the corruption now inherent in it. Christ was “both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all.” (33)
   
   I think this logic is particularly clear on p. 34. He sets out again the problem at the top of this page:
   
   “He saw that corruption held us all the closer, because it was the penalty for the Transgression; He saw too how unthinkable it would be for the law to be repealed before it was fulfilled.”
   
   Then at the conclusion of this argument he says:
   
   “He surrendered this body to death in place of all, and offered it to the Father. This he did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, when he had fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men.”
   
   The concepts are consistent through this argument: at the outset the problem is that the law must be fulfilled by the penalty of death being exacted; at the conclusion, the law is fulfilled by the offering of Christ’s body as a sacrifice in death to the Father.
   
   This reading of a twofold solution I think is sustained by the next page (35), where we read that “the Word[‘s body] … might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all, and, itself remaining incorruptible through his indwelling, might thereafter put an end to corruption for all others as well.” “He forthwith abolished death for His human brethren by the offering of the equivalent.”

I maintain, as I suggested here, that it’s not convincing to claim as Myers does that Athanasius is really only answering the question for whom is the atonement made in these passages. Certainly the point that Christ’s work is universal runs all through the book, but that just isn’t the only point made. Consider the discussion on p.33, in which Athanasius considers whether repentance from men would have been sufficient to restore us. His answer is no, on the grounds that this would involve God in an untruth, having stipulated death as the consequence for transgression. The issue is quite clearly how the atonement works. It is this strand of thought continued on the next page when the answer is identified as the sacrifice of his body for all.

Athanasius weaves together the various strands of his thought in one seamless whole which makes it difficult to isolate them, and we would probably be mistaken to imagine he had them delineated as such in his own mind. He aims to show how entirely fitting, unified and comprehensive is the work of the incarnate Word, circling around and around the theme to bring out more of the fullness thereof. As he says: “You must not be surprised if we repeat ourselves in dealing with this subject. We are speaking of the good pleasure of God and of the things which He in his loving wisdom thought fit to do, and it is better to put the same thing in several ways than to run the risk of leaving something out” (49).

But let’s say we grant that the emphasis of the whole is as Myers suggests (and it probably is, and he’s certainly a more qualified reader of Athanasius than I); for my money there is still a penal substitutionary theme, or mechanism present.